It feels like so long since I’ve posted a blog, probably because so much has happened this week. So I figure the best way to keep you all up to date is to go through one day at a time, beginning with last Tuesday, when my previous blog was posted.
Tuesday
I had a serious conversation with Squad Leader Soto about my personal life here on this new team in Swaziland. Doubts about who I am had come up, what this new dynamic was and how I fit into it. How do I figure out identity all over again or at least the next layer of that onion and not walk on egg shells around other people? After I unloaded everything that was in my heart to her, she called me out on several things.
I am a feeler (this is a Meyers Briggs reference), but because I so strongly associate feelings with weakness and femininity, I have been overanalyzing and trying to think through and process every little thing that I am missing the fact that God made me a feeler and that is a good thing.
Everyone is struggling with the new team, new people, and trying to figure out what our dynamic is. It’s okay to not know and to let it figure itself out as long as I am being proactive about bringing what I have to the table whether that’s personal gifts or things I learned from my last team. And make an effort to get to know people instead of sitting back and analyzing. If I spend all my time overthinking how everyone else is reacting to me, I will go to bed and wake up exhausted.
Open Hands. This is the biggest thing, the catchall if you will. With regards to my future, ministry, team, daily plans, it is always in my best interest to keep my hands open. This simply means not holding on to plans and desires so tightly that I feel let down, disappointed, or frustrated with God or man when they don’t work out. Most of the time I want the answers so badly that I get so frustrated and eventually exhausted with trying to figure them out. It’s one thing to explore it with God, but it’s another to be constantly coming back to it and to be distracted from ministry and the people in front of me by the unanswered questions in my head. This is still a huge work in progress.
Wednesday
We find out I might have lice and I begin a rigorous treatment involving an incredibly fine-toothed comb and smelling strongly enough of tea tree oil to knock out an elephant.
That night after hanging out with the girls that afternoon, we go out in the car to pass out some of the invitations we’ve made for Street Night. This is an evening that our ministry tries to host once a month to invite girls working the streets to come to a game night instead. They have food, a dance party, and hear people speak about God.
We got to see so many girls that night, so excited when they recognized our host to run up to the car, grabbing both an invitation for Saturday and a snack in celebration of Valentine’s Day. Sometimes we would even invite them into the car to talk for a little bit and drive them around the block before dropping them off again.
Most of them said no, but there was one girl, we’ll call her Jill, stood out to someone in the car, so we turned around to give her a second invitation. That time she said yes and got in with one of her friends, a girl we will call Spirit.
For the next two hours we end up parked in a grocery store parking lot as Spirit for the most part, tells us about her life, her kids, her boyfriend, and how much she doesn’t want to be on the streets. It’s the story of every girl working out there, it’s just not the story we generally hear.
We hear about running away from home and being a disappointment to family and neighbors, of not being able to go home with a child when you don’t have a husband. We hear about the shame of hearing your child get teased for his mommy being a prostitute. We hear the story of getting out and having faith in God to provide for a little bit, but when the feelings are allowed to get too strong and become overwhelming, the streets offer a little money, enough to put food in your child’s mouth for the next day. But you’re getting older and the customers have seen you, been with you and they’d rather pass you up for something, someone, new and exciting. So they ask you about the younger girls. The ones who were you just a few years ago; they haven’t finished school because they want the extra cash or because their parents have died as a result of HIVs and they have siblings relying on them. Most of the time the streets are an easy way to get cash quickly. The only cost is the love of yourself.
It’s an unforgiving system that sucks you in, sucks you up, then spits you out when you’ve come to rely on it.
After we prayed for them and told them about Saturday night, also extending an invitation to talk with them more at a later date, we drove them home, our ministry host giving them a little money because they’d willingly come with us and had missed out on customers that night.
I don’t know if I can really explain how it feels to hear a story like that. To know that yes, God always provides if we rely on him, but when we get in our own heads, when wondering and worries about how to feed her kids start overwhelming the knowledge of God, the only thing she knows, the only place she can turn to is a place that raised her, lied to her, and now might not even give her enough money to buy bread. Because she’s turned to it too often and everybody knows her now, because she got too old.
The desperation in her story, hearing her point of view and knowing that if I were in her shoes, that might easily be a trap I fell into . . . I don’t have the words to put it right, to describe her voice and passion about something she knows so well and hates so much. And something she doesn’t feel like she has any choice but to turn to. How do I tell her story so you understand? How do I, having heard it first hand, understand the choice she has to make as the sun goes down, thinking about her child who may or may not have eaten that day, who may or may not eat the following day? I don’t have the words or the understanding, not fully. But I do know how it felt to see her weeping in the car as we drove her home, hearing from her babysitter that no, her baby hadn’t eaten anything all day. There was not enough money for food.
For food. It’s something so basic. Something I don’t even think about except to try to avoid going to the grocery store when it’s time to make another run. We always have bread, heck, we always have variety. We’re cooking for ourselves so in other words we always have comfort food too.
I don’t have a pretty bow to wrap this one up. These thoughts are raw, sitting out there and festering. Unavoidable. I can’t pretend I don’t know anymore. I do know and it’s a huge problem all over the world. But what comes next? I don’t know.
Thursday
After getting to bed very late the night before, the biggest hurdle of the day was 1) staying awake, and 2) trusting God to help me lead the girl’s Bible study that evening. I knew we were studying Exodus 7 with the First Plague on the Egyptians, but other than that, God said don’t prepare.
So.
There I sit, twiddling my thumbs and trying not to freak out.
I think we also had something to do that morning that left me with very little time anyway, but I can’t remember what it was right now. Just know that we were busy and I was trying not to freak out. Oh, we went to the new land where they are building a new home for the girls since another organization is threatening to boot them out in the next week or so. We got to go to the land that morning where the first house for the girls is almost finished and we worshiped on that land. It’s Holy Ground.
What struck me personally when I read the passage as I was reading through it for my quiet time that day was not necessarily that God is a big god and that he can do big things like turn an entire (enormous) river and all the pools and every other source of water in an entire country to blood. I mean don’t get me wrong, that stuck out too, that’s huge and that we have a God who can do that without breaking a sweat and that he’ll do that for the people he loves is crazy. Personally it’s something with the whole Old Testament that I’ve forgotten to marvel at; God does these huge crazy miracles and we forget how cool they are because we’ve heard the story so many times.
But what really stuck out to me is that before God does anything, he tells Moses exactly what’s going to happen; “I will do this to your staff . . . I will do this amazing sign . . . and I will harden Pharaoh’s heart to show my glory to the entire world.”
And then it happens. Exactly like God says it will.
Obviously, I still have a few questions about the whole thing, like is it really God’s fault that all of those kids died in the tenth plague if God was the one to harden Pharaoh’s heart. But aside from that, I see God’s great faithfulness in this passage; how much he’s in control and how much his love is for his people. I also see how the Hebrews in that day had done so much as slaves that they’d made Egypt a great nation, possibly one of the greatest in all the world and that means that all the other people in all the other countries were watching Egypt. And if that’s the case, then all those people saw what God was willing to do for his people that that he is fully capable of backing up his words.
Wow. I wonder how many people outside of Egypt turned to worship him when they heard of all that had happened. And this was only through the course of a few days, those countries probably got the news of all ten plagues all at once. Wow.
Anyway, the girls took it pretty well. I’ve never seen a group of people so willing to answer questions in a Bible study and share what deep meaning they draw from the stories after hearing them. They continue to amaze me and frankly it’s an honor to serve them for a little bit.
Friday
This was our off day and very needed. We spend most of the day sleeping in, watching a few movies as a family and at the end of the day, everyone who hadn’t passed out invitations to the girls on Wednesday went out to pass out the rest of them.
Saturday
Safari!
With almost our whole squad, we journeyed about an hour away at a very early hour in the morning to go on safari.
It was amazing.
We saw lions, an elephant, wildebeests, m’pales, white rhinos, and several birds.
Take aways; African elephants are brown and even when they’re half grown, they’re very big. Also, Disney and all the zoos I’ve been to give incredibly unrealistic expectations of lions, they’re much bigger than I was led to believe. Sarabi and Nala have much more muscle in real life.
Also, if a lion starts coming toward your jeep buggy, the answer is to throw it in reverse and backup slowly until the lion decides that it likes the grass better than the road.
As I’d gotten up at four that morning to have a quiet time, it may be understandable that I was falling asleep on the ride home. And after getting inducted to the world of CHICAGO with Squad Leader Soto, Lynden, and Marah, I took another nap.
Around seven, we were picked up to go to the church that was hosting Street Night. We were given about an hour to pray for the space before heading over to the girl’s home. Apparently enough people from the church volunteered to help with Street Night that they really only needed us with the girls.
So after we finished praying, we headed over there and from eight to about half past one, we prayed for the women at Street Night, we worshiped in song, in dance, in art, in written prayer, and in singing prayer with all the girls. The only one who fell asleep was basically asleep before we got there. And those girls were amazing. They were so tired, but they pushed themselves to stay awake. At one point we even asked them to sing a song because their harmonizing is incredible, and they did it, their voices so pure and raised in a breathtaking display of worship.
The most notable part of the night was when Ashley, our team leader asked each of us to pray for each of the girls individually. I love allowing and watching the Holy Spirit move through me. It is so cool to ask for the words to say over each girl and then watch them pop out of my mouth.
My favorite moment of that exercise and consequently of the night was praying over Samantha, a girl I’ve been bonding with over the past two weeks – mostly joking and teasing each other. After I prayed for her, Sam turned around and gave me a really big hug.
She doesn’t do hugs.
She doesn’t like physical touch.
And yet she initiated it and it was heartfelt.
Later I learned a little more about her story, about how she ended up at Hosea’s Heart and what her family had expected of her before she got here. I learned that the staff believes she has recently accepted Jesus into her heart, but just hasn’t told anyone yet. And I learned that if we’d come about a month ago, we wouldn’t have recognized the girl in front of us now. Apparently there’s been a radical difference. And she is so cool. Too cool for me, obviously, and thoroughly enjoys reminding me how short I am, but I have a feeling when we leave next week, I’ll be leaving part of my heart in her hands.
Wow. She’s so cool.
Sunday
Sleep in. Check.
Go to church. Check.
REST. Check.
Then we headed to a dinner with the staff and our host to talk about Street Night. They told us it was a huge success. They had two girls come to Christ out of the twenty seven who came. Jill did show up for a brief time, but didn’t end up staying too long. They experienced no spiritual attacks and neither did we, praise God.
It was cool to hear the stories and to know that God is working in their lives, even if we can’t always see the progress.
Monday
Last, but not least, yesterday we all drove out to the new land to worship on it. We had a Capella and a couple of instruments. And the rain held off the whole time we were there!
Soon we will go to paint the new building and I’m looking forward to that.
That’s about all I have for y’all now.
Love ya,
TL
